


Bookmarks and Garlic Flowers

by DeCarabas



Category: Dracula & Related Fandoms, Dracula (TV 1968)
Genre: Gen, Multi, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-17
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-06 09:21:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5411444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeCarabas/pseuds/DeCarabas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On rational explanations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bookmarks and Garlic Flowers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lost_spook](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lost_spook/gifts).



John can’t stand the scent of garlic flowers anymore. This is only rational.

There’s a growing pile of books on his desk, pages marked in a dozen places; a journal full of his own notes on grief, on hallucinations, the dangers of mesmerism, the possible side effects of donating a substantial amount of blood. Outlandish fantasies are buried under lines and lines of ink; his fingertips are stained with them.

Hecker’s _Die großen Volkskrankheiten des Mittelalters_ offers a fifteenth century account of a nun who started biting the women around her. Her victims took up her strange fixation, biting their own companions, and like a disease it had spread throughout the walls of the convent. Excitable imaginations in isolation—such as in a nunnery, such as in a hospital, such as in shared grief—allow the nervous disorder of one to become the disorder of all.

Hecker’s writings are respected and reassuring, and John reads them with a bit of relief and a bit of nervous laughter and a greatly renewed appreciation for the vulnerability of even a trained and educated mind. But that appreciation can be only to the good—it can only lead to a greater sympathy for his patients, a greater understanding of the importance of his work.

His conversations with Van Helsing become somewhat strained.

Gradually, they stop altogether.

He picks up a slender volume on folklore and superstition from the bookseller, and he doesn’t like the man’s smile as he hands over the book, resists the urge to explain himself—he’s not interested in the stories themselves, it’s the motives behind them that intrigues him, the question of what possible comfort a mind could find in such fantasies.

But the bookseller’s smile has no hidden judgment in it; it’s simply professional.

The real world reasserts itself.

He goes to his club in the evenings, settles into the solid physicality of it, four square walls and an overstuffed armchair and the sound of strong voices and billiards. He sits and turns the pages of a book, and he always means to bring a copy of Hecker but that slender volume of superstitions is so much more portable.

He never really cared for the club that much before, preferred to spend most of his evenings at home with a simple meal and all the books that are now going unread while he keeps returning to that one volume of superstitions. Or else he used to take in the summer concerts in the park, or walk along the seashore; but he’s becoming aware of how many of his haunts are Lucy’s haunts.

Were, _were_ Lucy’s haunts. He corrects himself. The past tense is important to keep in mind.

Those familiar walks seem less solid now. He's there in his dreams as well, discomfortingly vivid. He never used to remember his dreams at all. And he catches himself waiting to hear her voice even in daylight; or else he turns his face to the wind, that light touch on his skin reassuring him that he's awake. Touch seems more reliable than the other senses.

He often finds Mina on those paths.

“Poor, dear John,” she says, taking his hands in hers. She’s taken to going without her gloves and wearing a heavy ring that doesn’t suit her, and her fingers are always chilled by the night air, but she’s smiling as if she doesn’t mind. A strong constitution. “Still trying to explain the world. It does get a little easier. I promise.”

She pats his hand and lets him go.

Sometimes he dreams of meeting the two of them there, Mina and Lucy, hand in hand. Sometimes he dreams of following them off the path, following a set of footsteps. He always seems to be following behind. But they slow, turn their heads, wait for him to catch up with welcoming arms.

He throws the book of superstitions on the fire.

Then he pulls it out again, the pages only slightly singed, slightly irritated with himself. It's just a book. There's no need for dramatics.

An ancient Greek text from the Hippocratic corpus joins the pile on his desk, a treatise on dreams. He hasn’t returned to it since he was a student reading up on the history of medicine; a text full of outdated ideas that troubled dreams are a sign of a troubled body—when they’re not sent by gods or spirits instead. The two theories lie side by side, mixed together with no apparent sense of contradiction. And as he finds himself getting distracted by older and older texts, older and older explanations, he finds something somehow comforting in that. The history of medicine is as much superstition as not, and it’s not always easy to see where the lines are drawn.

Sometimes he’ll hear Mina’s voice before he sees her, turn a corner and find her walking alone. And his increasingly well-thumbed volume on superstitions gives conflicting accounts of how to kill a vampire, and conflicting accounts of just what happens once they’re dead, and sometimes he thinks that no one really knows how anything works at all.

Those ancient Greek writers sounded so confident in their analysis, so certain they had their whole world neatly sorted out and categorized, and it had all been overturned in the end.

 _We all need a holiday,_ Mina says one night, and as she speaks she paints an image of long nights along the Danube, pale lights reflecting off the water; talking of someone else's fond memories, something she's looking forward to seeing with her own eyes. _You must come with us,_ she says, and it's not really a suggestion.

He’s not really surprised when he gets to the train station and Jonathan isn’t at her side. Jonathan wasn’t who she’d meant by that _we, us_. And the woman with her wears a broad-brimmed hat tilted low over her eyes, but he doesn’t need to see her face to know her.

He settles into his seat across from them, and as the train rolls along, relaxed by the weight of their voices in the air around him, he turns the pages of that little book of superstitions. There's something honest in those tales, in the way each wild story contradicts the next—no false promises of having the world's truth nailed down and understood, only a haze of possibilities.


End file.
